[Release] Beppo's Hole

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Right in the depths, surrounded by food that repulses you and yet more continues to rain down from above. You must try your best to climb and climb, hoping you can somehow reach the top. But what awaits you at the top? Maybe Beppo himself...

Beppo's hole is a slippy 2D platform where you're trying to climb all the way to the top. There is food all around you as enemies and obstacles. You need to avoid them, but if you're backed into a corner you can eat them and take a hit to your mobility as you get heavier and slower. That's the idea thus far anyway, gonna try play around and see how it works in practice.

I'm making it in Unity. Probably making the graphics myself but if someone did want to get involved I'm open to it because I'm not sure how much time I have to do the whole thing over the next two weeks. Sound is gonna be super important with pretty gross mastication style sound effects. For general music I think some fun could be had with this but I don't yet know how to make it work well. I've just been tuning the feel of your slippy out of control movement in an empty level and starting to add platforms and stuff before I add in actual foodstuffs.

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That'd be awesome, thanks! I definitely think that audio will be an important part of the feel. I'm already thinking about stuff like you get stuck to walls and just slide down them or there's slippy saucy floors. Having audio to pull on those would definitely sell the effect.

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This ain't a dead log, it's a dev log. I was busy towards the end of last week but I've been busying over the weekend on more of the art stuff. Here's a quick screenshot of the inside of Beppo's Hole.

And also a sneak peek of one piece from of the wall decorations I'm doing at the moment.

This is based on art by the wonderful Blambo of course!

As for gameplay, I've been playing around with the movement and system. And a change to the vomiting mechanic has adjusted the feel of the game. Now vomit propels not only propels you backwards but also rises you upwards very slightly, to give you a height boost and allow you to reach onto higher platforms.

Having tweaked the values, it's functioning like a sweet jetpack that's out of control. I'm playing around with how exactly it will go, but I'm thinking more like a race to escape Beppo's Hole and see how quickly you can manage it without meatballs smacking down on you and holding you back. I plan to get a nice gif of it soon, after I add in some more of the sprites and more of a level design than erratically placed rectangles.

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I've been tightenin up those graphics, so here's an updated gif of the hole.

At this point, I mostly want to set up a fun level to run through and try establish a good ruleset for the game. I do wanna include spaghetti somehow but I'm still unsure how it factors in.

When adding audio I would definitely like to also add splashy sauce effects that burst out with all the collisions and stay persistently in the world, but that might become quite taxing on this little game.

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This game has a real interesting mechanical set, and if you find the time to add some score and lose state to it I think you'd have a nice complete arcade action game. Also, successful use of gross sound effects.

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I enjoyed pulling together the disparate parts of this. I mostly just wanted to generate an idea on the theme and run with developing it in different directions. Which is what you're usually supposed to do in jams but is rarely what happens in my experience. I started with much more of a ruleset in mind, but when I was implementing the vomiting (which I originally intended to just be a way to reduce the mass that eating added) it actually had a surprising effect of broadening movement capability. I had initially plopped down an inaccessable platform because I didn't check the jump height properly, and I realised that with the vomiting I was able to reach it. Not only that, the slippy uncontrolled movement meshed well with this violent acceleration that you could achieve by spewing out the food.

I ended up sidelining the intended health or eating mechanics to focus on that. You do still need to eat to refuel your vomit boosting, but that actually ends up being a minor resource management element more than anything else. I'm quite surprised I ended up making a rough toughish platformer. I did, however, spend waaaaaaaay too long doing those portraits when I had a couple evenings where I was half socialising half working. I still didn't even get the Breckon. I did a thing I sometimes do where I just fall into a trap of pouring hours into a job I've determined instead of intelligently managing my time. Even if I was going to do half hearted art I could've done more animations for the character.

That wasn't the only reason I lacked time but it was a significant factor. It did leave me little time for proper polish elements like a pause screen, main menu, win state(a real one), fail state and music. I didn't have much time to add the sound effects Patrick R made for me either, they were largely just a matter of tweaking the audio levels, what triggers them and trying to not have them occur too often.

Also why the heck do I keep using Unity for pixel based 2D games?

The answer in my head is to be able to use a 'real' programming language but I ought to dig deeper back into trying out different engines and see what they can do for me.

This game has a real interesting mechanical set, and if you find the time to add some score and lose state to it I think you'd have a nice complete arcade action game. Also, successful use of gross sound effects.

I may or may not continue working on it. It could be a good exercise in polish if I tried to make it full (even if it's still pretty light on levels/'content').

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I'm ashamed to admit, but I was broken by Beppo's Hole. It'll take a stronger man than me to make it to the top. The art is excellent, the portraits are a nice indicator of where to find the next platform but... gaaah, I just could not deal with the jumping sensitivity and the regular plunges to the pit of despair and also of meatballs. In addition, the double jump mechanics took me a bit of time to work out - the earlier you double jump, the greater the boost. Huh. Interesting.

Would like to see more. Especially an easy mode, for the humans among us? =)

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I'll straight up admit, I made it hard because the ending was underwhelming joke with bad art

When you reach the top you win a free all you can eat meal, and touching it resets you back to the start of the level.

I want practice with fleshing stuff out and making it a full game with polish, pause, menu, etc. So I could do an actual level set that way and make it not one hard ramp up where you literally can't reach the first platform without learning how the vomit works.

Also I'm so glad that the portrait hints work, cause I only realised I had the directionless problem halfway through and then decided to pile in a bunch of those portraits.

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The delight of working out the portrait clues only made the despair greater as I sailed over my target platform, bound for the meaty depths below.

By the way, nice to meet another Irishman on the forums. =)

--Rev

I'm glad the despair was borne out too. Also cool that you're another irish person! dibs is here and also represents our fair land. Are you from Dublin? If you're from Dublin and have gone to some game making thing there is a good chance we've almost met.

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Not Dublin-based, but I do my best to get to every gamejam that's on in the smoke. I tend to miss a lot of Dubludo, but I'm looking forward to State of Play (if I remember to get tickets). Ah, I'm sure we've seen each other. =)